


Bones Beneath

by rosweldrmr



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: F/M, Heavily Implied Richie/Kate/Seth, Mentions of Santanico Pandemonium, Mentions of Seth Gecko, Minor Richard Gecko/Santanico Pandemonium
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-23
Updated: 2015-10-23
Packaged: 2018-04-27 17:44:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5057971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosweldrmr/pseuds/rosweldrmr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She dreams of him. | In the missing 3 months between S1 & S2 Kate starts to dream about Richie. But are they more than just dreams?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bones Beneath

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ivorygraves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygraves/gifts).



She dreams of him. At first she doesn't even realize the dreams are about him. They are just a tangle of images and voices she can't make out. But eventually she starts to see more clearly.

The cracked lens of his horn rimmed glasses. A blood stained shirt, a bandaged hand. They are memories, or she thinks they are memories. But the more she sees, the more she doesn't recognize. A faded, worn couch and the smell of lighter fluid. A blood soaked stone floor while Richie pleads for his humanity.

Kate doesn't know what to make of it at first. The way his lips felt ghosting against her, the way he leaned in by the pool and lit a cigarette cradled between her lips. His hand in hers while they prayed.

She wakes screaming. Seth is too high to notice, so she buries her head in her hands and takes deep breaths until the sharp pain in her chest and abdomen abate. She thinks she knows now, what it feels like to die. A fire burning in her veins, she cries herself back to sleep.

The more time that passes, the clearer the visions get, the more distance she feels grow between them. And she feels strangely like he's straining himself to find her in the dark. She wants to reach back, but she doesn't know how.

He calls to her. “Kate,” he whispers and all she can think of is the way he'd said her name after their kiss.

 _Richie is a tortured soul_ , she'd defended him in those musty catacombs. The oppression of the dark and the dank smell of blood still haunt her in her dreams.

“You are forgiven,” Richie whispers while she languishes in the twilight between sleep and dreams. He comes to her every night now. But it's still not enough. Not close enough. There is something standing in her way.

“You know what you have to do,” he says and she feels the agony it brings him, for egging her on. She already knows, she's known for weeks. She just couldn't bring herself to do it. Fear is a powerful deterrent. 

But at his urgings, she can't ignore it anymore. She thinks she might know now why Seth does it… gets high. She wonders what Richie shows him in the haze of heroin.

And suddenly she's furious. Did he know? How long had he been hiding it from her? It's selfish of him, to just check out on her. So just this once, she's going to be selfish too.

He'd probably flip his shit if he knew. The way he treats her sometimes, like a porcelain doll, so afraid she might get her precious soul dirty. But he can't see it, the rivers of blood that already flow from her hands, like the tainted Nile. She carries within her the plagues of Egypt.

He just can't accept that she's not the girl she was before the Twister. He's still trying to protect someone who doesn't exists anymore. Maybe she never did. He's guarding a ghost.

She's not just some holy relic to be locked away in a glass case and handled with white archivalist gloves. She is real and messy and capable of making her own mistakes.

So she waits until he's lost to the world. She prepares the smallest dose she can, meticulous in her actions. She's seen him do it enough to know the procedure. She's careful to use a clean syringe, needle, and spoon.

At first she doesn't think it worked. Maybe she missed the vein or didn't use enough.

She stands up to check the puncture in the bathroom halogen lights when the world drops out beneath her.

And suddenly she is falling. Like Alice, she twists through open space, twirling and spiraling as walls of stone and rubble rush past.

Down the rabbit hole she goes.

Richie is there when she lands. He's wearing the same suit she remembers, bullet holes, blood stains and all. He holds his holey hand out to her, a smile playing on his lips.

“I thought you'd never come,” his voice is soft, the way it was before they kissed. That kind of tone that makes her chest ache.

“Longing,” she says as she takes his hand. “This ache,” she asks, because she doesn't trust herself to know the distinction.

“Miss me?” he smirks and she feels the tears come. They prickle and burn in her sinuses, but at least this is a familiar pain.

He pulls her to him, her head rests on his chest. She can smell the dirt of the cave on him and feel his heartbeat against her cheek. She's forgotten how _tall_ he is.

“Why?” she asks when she feels more steady. “Why are you haunting me?”

“Because,” he says softly, tilting her chin up to look her in the eyes. “We're connected.” He wipes her tears away, the pad of his thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone under her skin. She feels naked under his intense focus, like he can see the bones beneath. They rattle like a wire-strung, wind chime skeleton.

“I killed him,” she confesses her sin like a Catholic at mass. Even though she's Baptist, she's always been enamored by the concept of confession. There is something alluring about baring her deepest sins and being forgiven. Especially now, she craves it. Like a starving man lost in the desert, she can think of nothing else. It consumes her, this desire for absolution.

“You saved him,” he corrects her she feels herself come undone.

“I've missed you,” she says and is surprised at the visceral truth of it. For two months now, she's been on the run. She and Seth settling into a comfortable rhythm of give and take. She is starting to feel more at home in her own skin, less like she's waiting to wake up, like she did those first two weeks. But there is something jagged between them, an uneasy truce that feels tempered. Brittle and fragile and capable of shattering at the slightest misstep.

They are incomplete, she realizes. They are off balance, off kilter without Richie. He is the missing piece, the missing force that makes their orbits align. Without him, they are left floundering, spinning off course, in danger of burning up.

“We need you,” she says but she feels less of him, like his hands are turning to mist against her skin.

 _Stay_ , she wants to say. But she can't bring herself to. She wants to throw herself at him and beg for him to come back. _Don't leave_ , she thinks.

“I'm dangerous,” he calls and his voice is stretched thin, like he's speaking to her from the bottom of an empty well. “You're safer without me.”

“We're lost without you,” she says and shakes her head. Her tears drip like rain beading off a tin roof.

“Soon,” he promises and kisses her softly. She can barely feel his lips and she is desperate for more. It's not enough.

What's left of him is torn from her grasp, her nails raking across the skin of hands where she tries to hold on.

\--

Richie wakes with a start, his heart pounding and his hands sting where her nails scraped red ribbons across the flesh there. He heals in seconds, no worse for wear. But his heart takes much longer to heal, to piece itself back together after the image of her is seared into his mind. A needle in her arm, fang scars in her neck, arms outstretched. She beckons him _home_.

“What's wrong?” Santanico asks next to him and he tries to even his breathing out.

“Nothing, it's just hard to sleep during the day.” The lie is clumsy but if she suspects, she doesn't say so.

 _Soon_ , he thinks. First they topple an empire, then he will find them. His family.

 Soon.

**Author's Note:**

> This is dedicated to Ivy because she's a horrible person and has sidelined by other fic so I can join this fandom and destroy me with feels. I'm not even caught up with S2 yet, but I couldn't help myself. RichieKate is my weakness, and RichieKateSeth will be my downfall.


End file.
